The Weather Channel Subjects Interns To Twitter-Powered Tornado

Interns are often expected to endure some less-than-ideal circumstances, but working through a tornado isn't usually one of them. In an act of social media genius, the team at The Weather Channel has given Twitter users some evil incentive to promote its week of wall-to-wall tornado coverage, also known as Tornado Week. They turned their office into a tornado simulator, and are subjecting their interns to tornado-force winds. With each Twitter mention of #TornadoWeek, the wind speed in the room increases. The goal is to garner 1 million tweets, which will "turn up the wind for a full blown EF-5 tornado."

At the time of this post, there were 10,100 tweets, and the effective wind speed in the room was at 110 mph, which is equivalent to what you might find in an F-1 storm.

The stunt is likely part of a larger move to make The Weather Channel as social-savvy as possible. Last year, it launched a hyper-local storm alert system powered by Facebook's Open Graph. And in February, much to the chagrin of meteorologists, it unofficially named an East Coast blizzard "Nemo" in an attempt to raise awareness about the storm via social media. You can watch this latest stunt live above, if you're into that kind of thing.